Kant and the Possibility of the Sublime in the Visual Arts

Résumé

Whether Kant’s critical aesthetics accommodates the possibility of art eliciting the sublime is a lively debate in the literature. Those who defend this possibility have generally based their account on Kant’s theory of “aesthetic ideas” (Pillow 1994, Wicks 1995, Tomasi 2005, Vandenabeele 2015). I argue that this common strategy fails. I propose an alternative positive account. First, if art is to elicit the Kantian sublime through its form, the viewer is required to adopt a particular mental condition such that they perceive the artwork as sheer magnitude or power, abstracting from that it is a human artifact, what its purpose may be, and what it is supposed to represent. Second, if art is to elicit the Kantian sublime through its content, it can do so in a second-order manner, through the representation not of natural objects which would directly elicit the sublime, but the sublime experience itself (of another subject).